2009.  I came up with a rule a few years ago. It was one of my usual half-baked ideas to improve my life — like going gluten-free or overdosing on kale — that usually has the shelf life of a ripe banana.

But, no. This plan was a little better, I thought, a little more life-enhancing. At a point in my life when illness and death and grief weren’t the surprise visitors they once were, when the casualties were increasing among people I loved, the people I didn’t love, the total strangers in the obituary columns who were my age or younger, maybe I should do some things a little differently.

I wouldn’t stop going to funerals and hospitals, God knows. But I could make it a point to show up at happy occasions — the parties, the celebrations, the anniversary dinners, the weddings — with the same sense of commitment I brought to marking the end of someone’s life. Why not celebrate when I could, as often as I could?

One of the first happy occasions I insisted on going to was the 25th anniversary party for our old friends, Dan and Toni. It was in Boston during the summer of 2009. As usual, my husband and I could have come up with a lot of excuses not to go, since it was a long trek for a short party, and there’s never enough time and money. But I was brimming with the conviction of my new, life-enhancing idea, so we went.

We went, we had a great time, we drank too much, we toasted, we told stories. Dan and Toni were such a perfect couple that most of the married couples in the audience developed a massive inferiority complex in a matter of minutes. Dan and Toni basked in their mutual adoration; they glowed with happiness; they had two almost-grown daughters who were perfect, too. If we all hadn’t loved them so much, we would have had to kill them.

We went home. I congratulated myself again and again on my wisdom about showing up for celebrations. Hadn’t I been proved right? Our Boston trip had been lovely.

2013. As I mentioned, illness and death and grief are no longer the unexpected visitors they once were. But they still shock and unsettle when they appear, no matter how old you are.

My husband and I are back in Boston with Dan and Toni, this time at their house.

We have known them since they first came together, decades ago, as a young couple. We knew them as a couple in their prime, both with demanding careers and strong ambitions, bringing up a family. Now, we know them in their last months or weeks together. We are seeing how it will end.

My husband, who talks to Dan every couple of weeks, already told me that Dan and Toni were passing some evenings by reading aloud love letters they exchanged when they were first in love and separated for a summer. This, at least, is something Dan can still do. He’s almost completely helpless now, his body ravaged by ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. He uses an oxygen mask connected to a machine to help him breathe as his lungs give out.

When Dan has to wear the mask, Toni or his caretaker position a microphone in it so that his voice booms out from a nearby speaker. His same voice, his same mind — sharp and witty and probing. Hearing him so minutely, listening to his regular breaths, feels as if we are all inside his head. We can temporarily forget he’s in a wheelchair, his head propped up, three of his four limbs useless.

Today, Dan wants all of us to tell him a single adjective or so we think defines us. Then, we will tell him the single adjective that best captures his essence. My husband comments that Dan never had any use for personality psychology before: What’s this all about? A single modifier that captures a person’s essence? Where did that come from? Dan tells my husband to shut up and think.

This conversation — our last, we know — is like that. By turns, it’s deeply serious, raggedly emotional, searing, brutal in its detail — then casually profane, acerbic, lighthearted, gossipy. After all, we’re old friends. In many ways, our conversation is relaxed and familiar, reminiscent of other times. We’ve been here before, right? No, we’ve never been here before. Not like this.

Dan thinks I’m worldly, which I think is a crock. I was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, I remind him. I can’t be worldly. Sophisticated, then, he says — another wrong answer. I want to be compassionate and perceptive. Nobody says that, though.

Dan says Toni is effective, which doesn’t entirely please her. She wants something more. He says my husband is curious; my husband is fine with that. Men are so easy.

And Dan himself? This is what the game is about, we all understand. Who is Dan to us? How will we remember him? How well have we understood him? Can we give him what he wants to hear? Will it be enough for him? We have to be honest, of course. None of us has ever had much use for artifice. Fuck artifice.

Witty, we say. Inventive. Intellectually curious. Playful. We go on and on, thinking, fumbling, failing.

How does he want to be seen? we ask. He wants to be clever, he says.

Clever! My husband and I shake our heads at this. Of course Dan is clever. Everybody knows that, which is why we didn’t mention it. It’s just that clever isn’t enough. He’s so much more than that. Clever’s a beginning, not an ending. We don’t want to leave it there.

The evening passes. It was, I tell my friend Marie the next day, an incredible time, both wonderful and terrible. The two were intermingled so tightly, you could never have separated them. Funny I had thought that you could only celebrate the unambiguously happy occasions. But this was its own kind of celebration, vibrant and gut-wrenching, joyous and bleak.

I would describe the four of us old friends as being agnostics — irreverent agnostics, at that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t find a certain holiness in our lives. Sometimes, we find ourselves surrounded by everything we consider holy — like a long and loving marriage, deep friendship, a shared past.

Clever, holy, however you describe it. Sorry, Dan, but a single word just isn’t enough.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Funny how even expected news can change your life

Jennifer Margulis is an award-winning journalist, health activist, wife, and mother of four. She’s also a friend of mine; we don’t agree on everything, but I greatly admire her intelligence, commitment, integrity and passion.

Margulis’ most recent book, The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line, will leave you outraged — especially if you’re a woman who’s ever given birth. Driven by economics, student loans, fears of litigation, coziness with the drug industry, and pure arrogance, American obstetricians seem never to have encountered a pregnancy they don’t want to repeatedly test and re-test, just to make sure. After all, somebody has to pay for those fancy ultrasound machines in their offices.

This is what happens, Margulis says, when every pregnancy is automatically medicalized and viewed as an illness — even though human beings seem to have pretty reliably populated the Earth over the millennia, with or without medical intervention. And what do we end up with in our well-educated, immensely rich country? More expensive health care, more medical interventions, and a maternal death rate four times higher than Bosnia and Herzegovina’s.

Not to mention our world record rate of C-sections, which is now up to one in three. As one of Margulis’ subheads dryly notes, American obstetricians and pediatricians tend to be keen to intervene.

Anyway, I highly recommend Margulis’ book, which focuses on a segment of the problems in American health care — but illuminates the entire industry. Reading it, you will find yourself nodding angrily, recalling your own experiences with the medical industry, its expensive guesswork, its reluctance to be questioned, its endless waits, its intimidations.

I know, I know — there are many wonderful doctors out there, some of whom I’ve been fortunate to see. But look around, read about the U.S.’s  health statistics and outcomes and expenditures, and you want to book a one-way ticket to Scandinavia. The system is corrupt and we’re all part of the system — until, as Margulis suggests, we begin to stand up to it and question it.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read more about the runaway medical train here and
here at the end of life

Flying business class is bad for the soul. I really believe that. It invariably turns a person like me — an avowed, all-power-to-some-of-the-people liberal — into someone who feels a little too good about herself since life has suddenly given her more legroom. It’s deplorable.

Deplorable and, again, bad for the soul — but good lord, but it’s great for the body. That’s why I try to upgrade every chance I can get on long, trans-ocean flights. I can always work on my unenlightened soul later, I figure, after the plane has landed. I am at an age when my soul is a lot more malleable than my body.

So, there I was, having wormed and certificated my way into business class, flying from Rome to Chicago. I read my book — The Man Who Saved the Union, H.W. Brands’ excellent biography of Ulysses S. Grant, to be precise — till my eyes began to cross.

Looking around, I noticed everybody else in business class was watching movie videos. I guessed that this was why you no longer have fascinating conversations with seatmates, since everybody is running his own, personal movie universe, but whatever. After I finally figured out how to turn on the audio, I joined the rest of them.

Here’s what’s odd — and strangely communal — about it: If you’re willing to crane your neck and get really brazen and shameless, you can see most of the other passengers’ screens. You know what they’re watching, what they’ve picked out, how they’re choosing to spend their time. It doesn’t take the place of a good conversation, but it’s its own odd form of modern-day communication.

Catti-corner to me, a woman’s screen showed a scene very familiar to me: A ship is passing by the Statue of Liberty, as its passengers stare silently at the towering figure. Look, there’s a very young Vito Andolini, soon to be renamed Corleone! It’s The Godfather, Part 2, one of my favorite movies on earth or in the skies — along with its predecessor, of course — which I have watched often enough to be a little embarrassed by it and realize I take a little too seriously, but that’s the way it goes.

I hadn’t seen the movie in ages — i.e., for at least a year — so, I knew I had to watch it again. I cued it up and sank back into the seat. That’s where the semi-public aspect of this individual movie-viewing became stranger. The guy next to me had awakened from a deep slumber, torn off his sleep mask, and plunged into watching Django Unchained, which was a perfectly good movie, but no Godfather or anything. So, I mostly watched my own movie and mused about the fact that had Francis Ford Coppola and the Corleone family been Southern Baptists, much of movie’s intertwined splendor, ritual and gore would have suffered greatly. Face it: Catholics know how to put on a show.

I tried to concentrate, but it was hard, since I practically had the movie memorized already, and besides, the woman catti-corner to me was displaying what would be going on in 45 minutes. (“I know it was you, Fredo! You broke my heart! You broke my heart!“)

But I persisted. The Catti-Corner woman finished Part Two, the guy next to me enjoyed his Django bloodbath, and overhead, The Life of Pi started up. By the time Fredo was sleeping with the fishes on my screen, the Catti-Corner Woman had cranked up Godfather, Part One, the guy next to me was glued to some lightweight comedy — revealing he wasn’t a serious cineaste, which I found a little embarrassing — and I was plunged into a dilemma. What now? I was too tired to read, too tired to sleep, I’d just seen Godfather One a few months ago and, besides, who wants to be a total cultural copycat?

Forget it. I chose one of my other all-time favorite movies, Chinatown, and tried to ignore the fact Roman Polanski, the film’s director, was a child molestor. It’s still such a stunning movie, engrossing, beautifully written, wonderfully acted, and John Huston wins my vote for the creepiest film villain ever. ”I don’t get tough, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does,” Faye Dunaway tells Jack Nicholson in a world-weary line I am still hoping to use in my own life.

On Chinatown, the illicit waters flowed, the trumpet wailed softly, and the darkness gathered. John Huston revealed that, ”See Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of … anything!” I wondered briefly whether a film without a felon as a director could have featured such a brilliantly chilling line.

Catti-corner, even though I couldn’t hear him, Brando was announcing that, “Tattaglia is a pimp!” after one of my favorite scenes in which the mafia chieftains embrace. On both screens, the guns blazed and the blood exploded, and the pilot announced we were making our initial descent into Chicago.

“You made it through both the Godfathers,” I mentioned to the Catti-Corner Woman as we exited. “I am so impressed. I only made it through the second one.”

An 11-hour flight in business class, and that was the only conversation I had with anyone. We left the plane, both of us humming the same song. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to think, since communication is good for the soul, even when you’re in business class.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read more revelations from a highly imperfect traveler

I never traveled outside the country till the early 1970s.

By then, I was in my early 20s and it was embarrassing to be an American. After all, the Vietnam War was still raging and the U.S. had been deeply shamed by the racism exposed by the civil rights movement (this was before an influx of workers from Africa and the Middle Europe had migrated to Europe, and Europeans had been forced to acknowledge their own intolerance and racism; individually and collectively, we all pay for our culture’s sins, I’m inclined to think).

Usually, my boyfriend and I tried to pass as Canadians back then. That involved looking as inoffensive and pale as possible. More than anything, we didn’t want to call attention to ourselves; the last thing on earth we wanted was to be seen as loud, obnoxious, Ugly Americans.

The years and decades pass and some things change and others don’t. The Vietnam War is long past and we’re longer in the tooth, but by God, we’d still rather croak than go the Ugly American route. If we have any complaints when we’re out of the country, we voice them politely and very quietly.

Which is what I was trying to do last week in Rome. The hotel we’d booked had been — to put it mildly — a disappointment. The lobby was a fifth-floor desk with a couple of brochures, the room small and loud, the molds so overwhelming I had a blinding headache.

So there I was, asking the young woman behind the counter to waive my upcoming night’s fee so I could stay somewhere else. Not that I knew the Italian words for “mold” or “headache” or “somewhere else.”

As we were talking, the deathtrap elevator suddenly jolted to our floor and its doors banged open. A man and woman of about my age stumbled out, strewing luggage on the floor. The woman screeched to a halt and threw her hands into the air.

“My God, Maury,” she announced. “You call this a hotel?”

Ignoring the hotel clerk and me, she shuttled past us. Her head preceded her body like a submarine periscope, crowned by short hair that was the deepest black I’d ever seen. Her voice was an intriguing cross between a gym teacher’s bellow and a broken foghorn, with a little seagull squawk thrown in for punctuation.

“This isn’t a hotel,” she announced. “This is a joke!”

“Madam — ” the hotel clerk began.

The woman flung open the door of a nearby room. She promptly went all-foghorn all the time.

“MAURY! LOOK AT THIS ROOM, MAURY! I CAN’T STAY HERE!”

“Madam, please. The room hasn’t been cleaned yet — ”

Maury, large and disheveled, stayed by the elevator, flanked by suitcases and staring intently at the wallpaper.

“MY GOD, MAURY! GET BETSY ON THE PHONE! WE’RE FIRING HER ASS! I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE BOOKED US IN THIS DUMP!”

“Madam, please — ”

“OUR TRIP IS RUINED, MAURY!”

The woman continued thrashing through all 50 feet of the hotel’s only hall, screeching dismay and issuing increasingly dire threats about Betsy. Meanwhile, Maury kept a close watch on the wallpaper.

“WHEN I SAY A FOUR-STAR HOTEL, THAT’S WHAT I WANT! THIS IS A JOKE, MAURY! YOU HEAR ME? A JOKE!”

I sneaked a glance at the hotel clerk — whom I’d seen earlier vacuuming and stripping a bed in one of the rooms. Her cheeks had paled and her voice had gone hoarse. She looked on, open-mouthed and resigned, as Maury’s wife stormed through the hall, like it was Normandy on D-Day.

I stood there silently, with my mold-y, sinus-y headache beating a tympani in my skull and a growing certainty in my gut: I wasn’t going to be continuing my own protests, however polite and reasonable. I just didn’t have it in me.

Individually or collectively, I was going to be paying for my own culture’s sins that night. It seemed like the least I could do.

I nodded at the hotel clerk as I left. Maury and The Foghorn were too busy to say arrivederci.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read this post about The Woman Who Learned to Dream in French

It was my brother-in-law’s 60th birthday, so we celebrated.

You might feel a little sorry for us since we’re all so old (he is, after all, my husband’s younger brother), but you can cut out the sympathy bit and save it for when we’re all dead. Right now, we’re all doing pretty well and, the truth is, if you’ve been fortunate, you can afford to spend your blockbuster birthdays in better places than you could when you were, say, 25.

Which brings us to Italy — specifically, the Amalfi Coast. That’s where we went. It’s easily the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever glimpsed, with heart-stopping overlooks and tortuous roads, grottoes, cobblestone streets, historic and charming towns, and azure waters. The surroundings are simultaneously so gorgeous and treacherous that you need to stop ogling them now and then so you won’t plunge over a cliff or get sideswiped by a bus.

Also, the food is wonderful — and probably even healthy, if those latest rumors about the benefits of a Mediterranean diet can be believed. I like those rumors, even if my own diet tilted heavily toward the gelato. Carpe dulce de leche!

To get to the house my brother- and sister-in-law had leased, you had to descend down a billion steps, give or take, from the road. I think they called the steps rustic in the brochure, which beats a lot of other more appropriate modifiers like deadly or harrowing. The first day I descended them — with rain beating down and the wind howling and the surface slippery and my neuropathic feet skidding — I decided I’d just stay down there for the rest of the week and just send out for pizza. Kidding, almost.

(So you can see that I’m not completely exaggerating, as usual, here are some of the stairs, which go on and on forever, too far for any camera to capture:)

The next morning, in a better mood, I trekked upstairs with the other guests and didn’t die en route. The staircase comprised 237 steps, someone calculated, which was the equivalent of eight flights of stairs. It made me feel both better and worse to hear that.

The days passed — glorious, sunny days of stunning views and steaming pasta. I traipsed up and down the staircase a couple of times a day. I didn’t grow to like it and I didn’t get any better at it.

“I thought I was in better shape than this,” I complained to my husband, who has an annoying habit of getting up early and jogging every other morning whether we’re in West Texas or Amalfi or New York City. “I’m on the elliptical a lot. I should be in great shape.”

He told my my problem was that I didn’t push myself enough on the elliptical. All I did was climb on it and read a book for 45 minutes. What I really needed to do, he said, was to sweat and be miserable and hate every minute of it — the way he did. That way, I’d improve my cardiovascular health and probably be leaping all over the staircase and throwing a party right now.

“You know I don’t like to sweat,” I pointed out. “If I exercised like that, I’d never go to the gym. I’d stay on the couch eating bon-bons all day and trying to get over the trauma.”

He just didn’t understand, I told myself, that my whole theory of exercise – which I’ve honed over a lifetime — was to pretend I wasn’t exercising while I was exercising. After all, I don’t like to suffer. My so-called regimen was kind of like reading a book that was bouncing up and down. Some days, in pursuit of what I call cross-training, I would actually get off the elliptical and amble to the stationary bike, where I could read even better.

As long as I didn’t know I was exercising, I would continue to do it, I reasoned. It was kind of like sneaking kale into a shake and pretending it was quite tasty and not even good for you. (It even had the added benefit that you didn’t have to spend the rest of your day picking kale bits out of your teeth.)

Anyway, it’s funny how travel — especially foreign travel — has a way of making you confront unpleasant truths about yourself. Somehow, the absence of the familiar can strip you bare of all pretensions.

For example: You think you speak passable French, which used to be the truth. So who is that idiot, then, who is tongue-tied and panic-flooded in the middle of a haughty boutique on the Left Bank after she has started the conversation with a pretty good Bon jour? Oh, yes, that would be moi.

And now, this: the allegedly fit woman who had thigh spasms over a few rustic steps.

I suppose I could have ruined the whole trip by deciding I was in pathetic shape and needed to completely overhaul my life and routine and devote the last few good years of my life to suffering and sweating and pure misery. Or I could just continue as I was, reading and bumping and ignorant in the gym, and suggest to my brother-in-law that for his 70th birthday we decamp to some equally picturesque joint with an elevator.

As you can imagine, I didn’t have to think about that one too long.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

For another enlightening post on travel, read I am My Own Sherpa, Among Other Things

Deep Background. Well, it all started when my friend Melanie McMinn, auteur of the wonderful blog, the Frugal Kiwi, embarked on a new diet.

(I call Melanie a friend. She is, even though we’ve never met in person and we live on opposite sides of the earth — she’s in New Zealand, I’m in Texas. But, reading someone’s blog, you get to know her. Melanie is always doing something revolutionary, as far as I’m concerned, like raising chickens or creating a wide variety of crafts or rebuilding her house — usually, all at once. Speaking as someone who can barely pry the lid off takeout containers, I’m humbled every time I see her latest marvel.)

Anyway, Melanie’s struggled with a number of serious health ailments and misdiagnoses over the past few years. She and her husband have scoured the Internet, looking for help. Most recently, adding salt to her diet has greatly diminished her crippling migraines. To alleviate other disabling symptoms, Melanie has begun a fairly radical new diet called the Wahls Protocol. (Read here about Terry Wahls, the physician who credits this protocol with dramatically improving her multiple sclerosis.)

All of which is well and good, but you might reasonably ask the question what on earth this protocol has to do with me. Hell if I know. But, once I read Melanie’s blog, I knew I wanted to try it. Or, more precisely, a watered-down version of it — since the diet requires eating three cups of kale-like vegetables, three cups of broccoli-like vegetables, and three cups of berries.

I mean, why not?

Even Deeper Background. I suppose I should level. Basically, I hate vegetables.

As my husband has very unhelpfully pointed out on numerous occasions, my preferred diet is white and beige, since carbohydrates are my life. He has also suggested I was a bad vegetable role model for our children (although, admittedly, I do have other good qualities, just about all of them non-dietary). I believe this relates to my native American blood; I have often thought I could live quite happily on an ice floe, eating blubber on a nonstop basis. But whatever.

Anyway, right now strikes me as the time of life when I’m willing to try almost everything — even vegetables. What do I have to lose? After all, I recently embarked on a gluten-free diet, since my friend Carol told me the regimen would give me more energy and cure my aches and pains. So, I tried it — kind of — for a few weeks, but never noticed much of a difference. (Update: said gluten-free diet hit the rocks when a new ramen restaurant opened nearby. Nothing can stand between me and a good noodle.) (Also, when I read that Gwyneth Paltrow was gluten-free, I knew I had made the right choice.)

Reality.  Kale seemed to be the answer to my new dietary regimen. Sure, I had never eaten kale, but everyone knows it’s a super-food. Our daughter, who was visiting, helpfully baked me some kale chips; they were quite good if you dumped enough olive oil and salt on them and tried to forget what they were made of.

I also drank smoothies made from kale and blueberries and yogurt every morning. I roasted broccoli, I tossed spinach, I sauteed brussels sprouts. At night, I even sneaked some vegetables so I could meet my cup-a-day requirement. I can’t tell you how low your self-esteem plunges when you realize you have become the kind of person who is sneaking cruciferous vegetables.

I went to Whole Foods to buy kale chips after our daughter left; I knew I was too lazy to ever make my own. Besides, how expensive could they be? Answer: They cost a frigging fortune. Five, six, seven dollars for a small package. I bought them nevertheless. I was still that naive, that hopeful.

I think it was the barbecued kale chips that did me in. Or maybe it was the zesty nacho kale chips. Whichever. They both sported the attractive appearance of animal vomit. They didn’t taste much better.

I gave up. I realized that even though I was at the time in my life when I would try anything, even kale, I was also at the time in my life when I could hoist the white flag and walk away if I felt like it.

Recently, I got an email from Melanie. She’s doing wonderfully on her new diet — feeling much better, pushing onward. I was thrilled to hear it. It made me realize one of the things I appreciate the most about her: She can do things that are impossibilities to someone like me. I’m going back to my white-and-beige diet, which is where I doubtlessly belonged in the first place.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read about being bludgeoned to death by exclamation marks

My friend Quincy is tall, striking, multi-talented and emphatic. Trust me, you don’t want to argue with her.

“You need to write about this,” she said. Then she repeated herself, fixing her laser-beam eyes on me. “You need to do it,” she said.

“This” was a memorial service for Mary Margaret Farrabee — a lovely, accomplished, vibrant woman who had done so many good works in our community. She would be missed by everyone who knew her, from family and close friends to people like me who knew her more casually.

Her service was at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center on the southern edge of Austin. Attendance at the service was so large that it spilled over from the auditorium into an adjacent gallery, where the audio of the service was broadcast. I was in the gallery, sitting next to an old friend from law school. Forty years ago, she’d been small and peppery, with short, reddish hair. Today, she’s more reserved and her hair has turned white. She’s also a grandmother.

Waiting for the service to begin, she and I whispered comments about people we’d gone to law school with — the liberal feminist who’d turned Republican, the liberal feminist who’d become more radical, the state judge being scrutinized under a court of inquiry for his role as prosecutor in the Michael Morton case. We elbowed each other, we gossiped, we laughed, until it was time for us to be quiet.

Later, after the service was over, most of us went outside into the courtyard, with its limestone paths and open skies. With the record drought ongoing, it wouldn’t be a good year for wildflowers here or anywhere else in the state. But it was peaceful and sunlit outside, in one of the prettiest places in the city. How long had it been since I had been here? I had no idea. But it must have been years.

The day after Mary Margaret had died, I’d had lunch with a raucous group of women I love to be with — Ellen and Bonnie and Anita. We’d talked about our friend and her death, but then we moved on to other topics. What did we want for our own lives? What was most important to us? What did we want to leave behind? What did it mean to be a “good person”?

Later, we realized our conversation had been inspired by Mary Margaret’s life; she was a woman who’d lived fully and well, who had touched so many lives, done so much good. What were we, her friends, going to do with the time we had left?

Friends’ deaths and their memorial services are like that: They remind us of a single person — but also of ourselves and our own impermanence. At Mary Margaret’s service, I talked to a friend who’d recently had a stent put in his heart. To former neighbors I hadn’t seen in months. To old acquaintances I hardly recognized.

We spend so much of our time bent over electronic devices, rushing somewhere, never staying long, Quincy and I agreed when we spoke. What was so important that we were always in a hurry to get somewhere else, that we never had time — like this — to stand around and talk with old friends? A year from now, five years from now, would we be able to recall what had been so pressing at the time?

The sun grew warmer and our shadows shortened. The faces around me had changed, as, I knew, my own face had altered. I knew, too, that when all of us spoke about time being short, the remark had taken on a different, starker meaning than it once had.

Right now, I just wanted to stay here for as long as I could, warming myself in the sun, breathing in the fresh country air, talking and laughing and remembering. What could be more important, at this time of day, than lingering as long as I could?

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read about failing as a Tiger Mom

Maybe you thought everybody at the recent South by Southwest festival was young, hip, whiplashed into skinny jeans, fedora’d, tattooed, drunk and/or preternaturally cool. If so, you must have missed me.

I was the deranged harpie screaming at the pickup truck that almost sideswiped me, the exhausted film-goer who spent the few remaining good years of her life collapsed on the sidewalk while waiting in line for yet another movie, the frantic coffee guzzler, the canny enthusiast who picked out movie seats based on their proximity to the women’s restroom, the early-bird seat-holder who glared at your backpacked posterior when you tripped over her feet and didn’t say “excuse me,” all the time muttering questions to the universe about whether you were raised by wolves or hatched by homicidal chickens.

Yes, that was me!

I was also the downtown Austinite who was happy to see you all clearing out after 10 days of bacchanalia, trash, sidewalk vomit, and ear-shattering mega-decibels of music and cacophony and wailing ambulance sirens.

But, still — don’t feel sorry for me. I had my fun, too, in the midst of the hazy and muted and oddly pleasurable joie de vivre that persists after both pride and skin elasticity have departed and you no longer — how to put it politely? oh, yes! — when you no longer give a fuck.

So, I hotfooted it from movie to movie, seeing documentaries and feature films picked out on the basis of my current mood, rumors, reviews and whether I liked the title or not. Here are two true SXSW film stories:

1) FREDA

Early on, I picked out the documentary Good Ol’ Freda as a must-see, since it told the story of the woman who was the secretary and personal assistant to the Beatles. Then, I heard from a very good source (i.e., another woman of my vintage who was waiting in a film line and had already seen Freda) that, although Freda was quite discreet and wouldn’t answer directly, it was pretty clear to her that Freda had slept with all four of the Beatles.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “All four?”

“I think so,” she said.

I personally found this so thrilling I could hardly stand it. “Freda’s a heroine for women our age,” I announced to no one in particular.

Then, I ran into my friend Barbara at another movie and she told me she’d loved Freda — both the movie and woman — too. She agreed that there was something there. Yes, Freda had been a bit evasive about what happened or didn’t happen, she confirmed.

“All four — do you think?” I asked.

Barbara shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

“After all, it was the sixties,” I said. “I bet it happened. I hope so.”

Minutes later, Barbara went across the lobby to talk to another friend. I looked at the woman standing next to me. “Freda,” her badge proclaimed.

“Oh, my God, are you the Freda?” I asked.  ”Freda Kelly? The one in the documentary?”

She said she was and introduced me to the documentary’s producer. They gave me a free ticket to a later showing, since I was such a big fan.

I knew what I wanted to ask Freda, but, as usual, I didn’t have the nerve. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?” I asked.

She said it varied. Right now, since he was in the documentary, it was Ringo. (I thought this was, perhaps, significant.)

After Freda and the producer left, I went running up to Barbara to tell her Freda had been in the lobby, we had talked, and she’d given me a free pass.

“Freda was here? Where is she?” Barbara wanted to know. “How did I miss her?”

“They had to go back to their hotel,” I said.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized: 1) since Barbara had beaten me (badly) the last time we played Scrabble, it probably served her right that I got to meet Freda and she didn’t; 2) given that Freda and I were now good pals, did this mean I was practically a Beatles intimate myself?; and 3) what did her remark about Ringo signify? Was she hinting at something?

I saw the documentary. I loved it. I’m still wondering about everything else.

2) Nixon

My husband and I particularly loved Our Nixon, the doc about home movies taken by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the impossibly young Dwight Chapin during the Nixon presidency. We’re both big Watergate junkies and veteran Nixon-haters, so we were delighted by the glimpses of Sam Ervin, the North Carolina senator who called himself “just an old country lawyer” as he eviscerated administration witnesses, and that pipe-smoking thug, John Mitchell, the attorney general who spoke so poetically of tits and wringers.

At the end of the documentary, the producers held a Q&A, first noting they had bobbleheaded H.R. Haldeman dolls as prizes for Watergate trivia answers. My husband nudged me. “You’re going to win one,” he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about. As you can see from this earlier, heartfelt post, he thinks I thrive on a diet of pure trivia and gossip. This ignores the fact that I am really a very serious person who spends her life pondering metaphysical questions and the imbroglios of the human condition. So I ignored him.

The apres-film presenter asked two or three questions that didn’t especially interest me. Then she homed in on a subject of great significance: Who was the former Bond girl who dated Henry Kissinger?

“Jill St. John,” I screamed.

Bingo! A winner!

“I knew it,” my husband muttered loudly. “See?”

Later, when I toted my little HRH bobblehead home, I lamented that they hadn’t asked a follow-up question about what Jill St. John’s IQ was (162) or what Nora Ephron called Julie Nixon Eisenhower (a chocolate-covered spider).

I might not know which of the Beatles Freda slept with — still. But I do know a little something about the human condition when it comes to the Nixon administration. And I have the prize to prove it:

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read about SXSW 2012

Every marriage goes through its trials. For one thing, you have to figure out what’s really important. You can spend years focusing on one thing, then realize later that you’ve been wasting your time on something sadly trivial.

Take my husband’s speaking engagements. In the early years of our marriage, I’d hear him groaning and loudly agonizing about an upcoming talk.

“I haven’t done anything to prepare,” he’d say. “I have no idea what I’m going to be speaking about. I’ll probably fall flat on my face.”

Well, that got my attention. (The prospect of public failure and humiliation usually does.) If he was going to be a basket case, then so was I. After all, I was a far more accomplished worrier than he was. In my family, they practically handed out trophies for Best Worrier, and the competition was ferocious.

So I’d obsess about my husband and his talk when I wasn’t obsessing about my own life and some upcoming disaster I probably needed to prepare for. Time would pass and I would eventually notice my husband wasn’t agonizing and moaning, so I’d ask him about the talk he’d been so concerned  about.

“Huh?” he’d ask.

“You know,” I’d prompt him. “That talk you were so worried about a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh, yeah,” he’d say vaguely, frowning.

“Well, when is it?” I’d ask.

He’d shrug. “I gave it last week.”

Silence. He’d be concentrating on something else. It was the pre-smartphone era, and I’ve long forgotten what men concentrated on then when they were acting too busy to be bothered with something important like their wives, for example.

“WELL, HOW DID YOUR TALK GO, GODAMMIT?”

I am not normally a screamer, but you know, sometimes you have to raise your voice. I learned that from the feminist movement.

He’d look up, finally, and shake his head. Then he’d grin. “I knocked it out of the park.”

Well! I won’t bother to tell you how many times we had variations on this melodrama and conversation, since I have no desire to make it clear how slow-witted I am. Let us say, rather, it took me awhile, but I finally caught on.

My husband went on speaking here, there, everywhere. Before he spoke, he’d engage in a little of the same whining about how unprepared he was and, oh, my God, how he was primed for disaster. But I’d learned to ignore him. After a while, he cut it out. Men can’t stand the sight of a woman rolling her eyes when they speak.

Years passed like that, the way years do. Hundreds of talks were given, maybe thousands for all I know. I saw only a fraction of them, but it still added up. Let me say: My husband’s an excellent speaker — relaxed, confident, enthusiastic, knows what he’s talking about.

So, it was a surprise when the TEDx talk came around. (Here, I will stipulate that people are either well-versed in all things TED, in which case they light up like the Fourth of July, or they look blank and polite. If you’re feeling blank and polite, please see this. Let’s just say that to many people, TED is a big deal, and my husband was speaking at one of the affiliated conferences in Austin.)

Another speaking engagement. Fine, great, no big deal.

But then, the date grew nearer and the TEDx talk and preparations moved in with us on a semi-permanent basis. My husband was used to freewheeling talks, taking his time, improvising, winging it. TED is a different animal. Its timing is rigorous, its narrative arc more prescribed. At its best, it produces snappy, inspiring, energetic talks that leave audiences jazzed and ignites their curiosity; at its worst — and this is only my opinion, but then, it’s my goddamned blog — it can trend toward the facile and formulaic. Still, it’s a big deal.

Anyway, I’d never seen my husband sweat a talk the way he did his TEDx. He wrote it, he re-wrote it, he re-re-wrote it. (This is from a man who doesn’t believe in revising.) He got a narrative, he changed the narrative, he deep-sixed the old narratives. He even worked, over and over, with a TED coach.

I witnessed it all. It was kind of like hosting a small storm in our condo; you couldn’t escape it, so you didn’t try. I read narratives, I changed them, I offered criticisms. And I listened. God, I listened a lot. At first I tried to paste on the worshipful Nancy Reagan face, but after a while, it dissolved from overuse.

TED in the morning, TED in the evening, TED at suppertime. TED was also in the shower; I know, because I asked. Forty-eight hours before the unveiling, I begged my husband to wait till the next morning till I heard his talk again. “I can’t hear it again right now,” I said, desperately clutching a glass of wine. (Like Nancy Reagan, I had to just say no.)

Finally, TEDx day dawned. My husband’s talk went well, as you can see here. We both went home, exhausted. It was time to get our lives back to normal, with his muttering about upcoming talks and my ignoring him.

That’s another thing you figure out about marriage. Sometimes, the status quo is just fine.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read another of my favorite posts about marriage in So, This Is What a Look of Love is Like?

I have been concerned about that toxic little nerd Rick Santorum for a long time. I mean, is it really good for you to live in a permanent state of Old Testament fury and fiery judgment — especially when the earth is already heating up? I think not.

But I really began to worry when Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and presidential aspirant, began to obsess about how gay marriage is a big threat to his own “normal” marriage.

Good grief. I try to be tolerant and all that. But I do tend to get a bit out of sorts when people go apeshit over others’ lives. Especially others’ intimate lives that don’t involve them, except as looming chimera in their tiny little heads.

All of which brings me to one of my favorite quotes from H.L. Mencken about the definition of puritanism: “The haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be happy.” Oh, yeah, somebody else’s happiness. What could possibly be more threatening? Get out the fire hoses, the snarling dogs, the tear gas.

I suppose I’ve become even more sensitized to Santorum and his ilk after moving to a condo two years ago. We’re in a new building, and I think that’s one reason why everybody is so friendly. Sometimes it’s like living in an extremely cushy freshman dorm. People talk and get together, go to movies, wine tastings, cultural events. With a few exceptions, it’s a sociable, cohesive, fascinating group of people.

I don’t pretend to know everybody in the building well, but I do have a fairly decent sense of most of the 50-60 of us who live here full time. Unlike a traditional neighborhood, we don’t meet on our front lawns. Most often, we gather in the lobby or run into one another in the elevator or the mail room or sweating in the gym. Over time, it adds up.

Within this neighborhood, we have singles and couples, married and unmarried. Two of the couples are gay males. In many ways, they’ve been a revelation to me, illuminating some of my own biases.

I don’t think I had any bias toward gay couples, but what I did have was a number of preconceptions about how men of any sexual orientation act in a long-term, committed relationship. Namely, they aren’t terribly romantic; it’s usually the women who want and demand more romance and often end up sulking in disappointment and gorging on chocolate. (See this 2012 Valentine’s Day post for validation).

But the four men who comprise these couples showed me how dimwitted I was. They’re warm and affectionate and loving and, yes, romantic. One of them decorated their door with paper hearts on Valentine’s Day last year. They speak of each other with a tenderness that is lovely. They proclaim their good fortune in having found each other.

“We’ve been together for years — and I’d like to get married,” one of them said recently. “But we’re from Texas, and I don’t want to go to another state to get married. I want to get married here.”

He shrugged and I shrugged, too, since that is currently impossible in a state with a legislature where Rick Santorum would fit in just fine. (I’m not sure whether Texas legislators are more scared of gays or women, but I would say to my gay male friends: Well, at least they’re not passing draconian laws requiring you to get trans-vaginal sonograms.)

But, anyway! Looking at these two couples in our vertical neighborhood, something else occurs to me. Maybe Rick Santorum has a point. Maybe he should be threatened by gay male relationships. These couples are showing up their heterosexual brethren in the romance department. You don’t think women — even poor Mrs. Santorum — won’t be noticing that?

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Just because I still love it so much, please read Just for Today, I am Pat Robertson